Sleek, Witty Widows Lives Up to the Hype

Among the most anticipated world premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this year was Widows,Steve McQueen’s reimagining of the 1980s British miniseries about gangsters’ wives pulling off a heist after their husbands are killed in the line of ignoble duty. The hype was there for good reason. McQueen’s last film, 12 Years a Slave, won best picture (and several other Oscars) and grossed nearly $200 million worldwide.

On top of that, McQueen co-wrote the Widows screenplay with Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn. And then there’s the cast! Oh, the cast: Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Brian Tyree Henry, Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, and more. This is about as pedigreed as a studio thriller could possibly get.

I’m happy to report that Widows delivers on all that starry promise. McQueen has made a film that’s sleek and muscular, a polished product that has a barb-wire ribbon of tenacious political fury running through it. It’s somehow both heavy and light, a giddy entertainment that still urges at deep social ills.

Set in Chicago, a city in which rampant street violence bumps up against boggling and corrupt wealth, Widows is rife with pertinent detail, doled out sharply by McQueen. He’s not a subtle filmmaker, exactly, but his indicating has a gracefulness to it. There’s nothing didactic about the way the film addresses matters larger than its heist plot; the micro and the macro are woven seamlessly together, shown to inform and curse one another in the unending churn of civic life.

Davis plays Veronica, a former teachers-union rep whose comfortable, Lake Shore Drive life is thrown into chaos when her husband, Harry (Neeson)—a thief with political connections—goes down, along with his partners, in a fiery police shootout. That’s enough to be upset about, but Veronica soon learns that Harry stole a hefty sum of money from an aspiring 18th Ward alderman with criminal ties (Henry) who would like his cash back. So she assembles her team of grieving spouses (and one outsider) to make good on Harry’s best laid plans for his next job, with a critical deadline looming.

There’s less action in Widows than some might expect, or hope for. But McQueen and Flynn compensate for the lack of bang-bang by giving us a gripping, if only introductory, tour of the systems, legit and otherwise, that govern the city. They’ve populated their film quite well, too: the crooked politicians and political crooks, the henchmen and their dispatchers, and of course our heroines, trying to navigate their way through this tangle of networked self-interest to get themselves to good.

Going actor-by-actor to point out how each one does a nice job would take too long. In lieu of that: Davis yet again projects a compelling strength among the wounds. Farrell and Henry find a crackling chemistry in opposition. Erivo makes a striking film debut and has the best arms of anyone in the movies this year. Rodriguez finds a new emotional register we haven’t seen her explore before. Everyone’s aces, all stepping up to do their best in this heaping bowl of prestige popcorn.

But I must single out two performers, because they’re both great, and because they neatly represent several successful aspects of the film. As a slinking, smirking enforcer perversely named Jatemme (pronounced the way the French say “I love you”), Kaluuya is mesmerizing, with his insistent physicality and the sinister purr of voice. He’s got a great, malleable face too, capable of wide-eyed alarm, as in Get Out, and the hood-lidded, bored-with-your-human-mortality menace he does here. He’s the movie’s cool and idiosyncratic articulation, its grimness flecked with a wicked glint.

Debicki, as a battered widow unsure of her worth beyond her looks, embodies the film’s sensitivity, and its humor. (She has one sight gag that’s just priceless.) Debicki has been a standout in most things she’s been in since The Great Gatsby (please watch her in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), and here she plays ostensibly the second lead with commanding poise. She and Davis spar really well together, and she lends some tricky scenes with Lukas Haas—as a rich sugar daddy–type—the pained nuance they need.

The movie exists in a space where gender and racial politics are ever immediate—which is to say the movie exists in the real world, albeit a heightened version of it. McQueen resonantly evokes those charged dynamics, both gesturing toward them through clever staging and directly confronting them—particularly in one brief but devastating flashback that grounds the film in a very contemporary crisis. I’m being vague because I don’t want to spoil anything, but I can say that McQueen does not deny his film a social message. The quickness and bluntness with which it’s introduced only deepens its power.

All the while, Widows remains robustly entertaining. McQueen doesn’t overwhelm the snaking plot with overly elaborate filmmaking; the movie has a confident style without preening or showiness. Here’s the sort of studio movie we wish they’d make more often, an auteur having splashy fun while also tending to his more serious impulses. Widows is the rare film of its size to strike that balance beautifully. Nothing is without consequence in McQueen’s rattling and rewarding film, and yet you still leave the theater feeling as though it’s just gotten away with something grand.